Ericsson ties up with locals to develop Net

Ericsson ties up with locals to develop Net

JAKARTA (JP): Telecommunications infrastructure provider PT
Ericsson Indonesia said here on Wednesday that it would cooperate
with local application companies to develop mobile Internet
services in the country.

Ericsson Indonesia's president Mats H. Olsson said that it had
reached agreements with five local companies and was in the
process of negotiations with five more.

He declined to reveal the names of the companies until firm
agreements had been concluded with all of them.

"We have already reached agreement with five companies, and
more than five others are in the pipeline, but we're waiting for
the number to grow to 10 companies before we start announcing,"
Olsson told a media workshop here.

Communications manager, Dewi Widiyanti, said the kind of
applications offered to the local companies included specific
client-oriented applications such as mobile banking and mobile
ticketing.

The rapid development of the short message service (SMS) in
the country was a sure indicator of the increasingly popular data
exchange between mobile users, Ericsson Indonesia's director of
consumer products Susanto Sosilo said.

"For example, the SMS traffic of Satelindo increased by almost
100 percent when the inter-operator service was introduced
earlier this month," he said, citing that traffic for the
cellular operator increased to about 60 million messages a month
from 30 million before the inter-operator service was available.

Susanto said that SMS was in fact the first and necessary step
to moving towards third generation mobile services with their
high-speed data transmission.

Ericsson took a step further when it recently established a
forum, the Ericsson Developers' Zone (EDZ), for application
developers to exchange ideas and introduce their products to the
global market.

The company's Internet applications senior manager Hindra
Irawan said the web-based EDZ brought together application
developers, content providers, operators, technology providers
and cellular operators.

"The aim is to accelerate the development of mobile Internet
applications for future telecommunications services," he said.

Currently EDZ has more than 90,000 individual members and more
than 3,000 corporate members, some of which are from Indonesia
Hindra said. He stated though that he did not know the exact
number of Indonesian members.

In relation to the massive layoffs planned on account of the
economic slowdown in the United States and Western Europe, Olsson
asserted that layoffs of Ericsson employees would not take place
in Indonesia as business in the country had in fact doubled for
two years in a row.

"Ericsson will reduce 10,000 people globally, of which 4,000
are from Sweden ... there will be no layoffs in Indonesia as we
need all the people we have," he said. (tnt)